By New Year’s Day of 2008, the world’s most powerful supercomputer may reside in the Lone Star State. Sun Microsystems announced today that it would build a massive new machine, to be called “Ranger,” for the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center.
According to Wired News, the supercomputer will be able to complete 504 trillion calculations per second — or 504 teraflops, in supercomputing terminology. That easily trumps the current world-beater, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s BlueGene/L, which runs at 327 teraflops.
All that computing power comes with a pretty hefty price tag. Ranger’s hardware costs $30-million, and staffing and maintenance costs for the machine will run nearly as high. Luckily for the computing center, the National Science Foundation is footing the bill. —Brock Read
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